because bit happens…

Why I donated to Wikipedia

Well, it’s that time of the year again where Jimmy Wales is once again asking millions of Wikipedia users to donate a few bucks helping them to keep their lights on. Since Wikipedia calls itself nonprofit, independent and ad-free they are mostly depending on donations. In todays email Wikipedia claimed they would not have to fundraise for years if everyone would give today but appearently only 1% of the users donate an average amount of $15.

Looking at Wikimedia Foundations Financial Reports you could observe that this financial year has been closed with expenses of $66m and a revenue of $82m of which $78m came only from donations. In fact they seem to be doing quite well. In fact so good that they ware able to accumulate $46m in cash or cash equivalents as of June 2016. At first sight that sounds like a huge amount of money which it surely is, but if you think again you will conclude that they could not even run for a single year without donations.

Since I frequently use Wikipedia at home and at work I just felt to owe them something for everything they helped me with. So I decided to donate 25€ because I really wanted to help the people over at Wikimedia Foundation to keep spreading information and knowledge all across the globe. I really think this website marked a huge leap in the history of the internet and serves for one of its key invention reasons: sharing and finding information free of charge for everyone.